RE: Minor Upgrades This Week In Preparation For Tartarus 2.0 Release!
As someone that maintains a very high rate of voting for various reasons and keeps a low voting power as result, I still think this is a good change. My concern in the past was about the rate of rank increase changing relative to active voting and comparing to an inactive account with 10SP increasing rank faster, but this priority impact makes more sense to me because it isn't causing long-term damage for something that has immediate impact.
I can imagine some ways people could manipulate that algorithm are possible by having a controlled oscillating voting power allowing for recharge before posting waiting until votes then draining voting power again, but it would only be a minor change because the incoming votes are distributed over time and the max possible impact of such manipulation would only be to return to the current system, so it seems like an improvement overall and people would have a hard time getting around it. To make it bullet-proof I think the voting power as part of calculation would need to be their average over the last 6~7 days, any more than that may be too much punishment for using some votes but any less and it has some subtle loopholes. Anyway, I don't figure anyone is going to manage to do that especially in any consistent manner over time, but it is something to consider ^_^
Agreed if we do see abuse we will begin to look into something that you suggested it is very similar to how we calculate Shadow Rank increases already (moving averages). We do not discourage manual voting, we only encourage to maintain an average Voting Power that is relatively high (over 92%). As you pointed out this update directly effects each member based on their contribution to the pool based on voting power, which means those who give more votes get more. This allows those who wish to vote a little more to go out and get that and still be part of the ShadowBot system while when they are not voting maybe on vacation to reap the rewards of the system fully by having their Voting Power and thereby Pool Priority go up! We feel this is the closest system we have so far that aligns with what the white paper and concept of steem is!